please give me satire that is marginally connected to the lived stuff that is supposed to give its comedy force (ok i didn't read the rest but this gave me absolutely no reason to -- it's like David Lodge with no bite -- and how sad is that?) crap i can't remember the other thing, it's like a zillion degrees here and i've been drinking since 12. i'll trade you ways to respond to ex-boyfriends you still love but don't you know love for semi-cute things about how crap the departmentalisation of university life can be...
whatever,
Cat.
Quoting Bryan Atinsky <bryan at indymedia.org.il>:
> My friend Paul Ford, who has a brilliant website (Ftrain.com), just published
> this piece on a certain culture studies dept...
>
> The piece is here:
> http://ftrain.com/mckee_recursion.html
>
> But here is a bi of a clip from the article:
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> My host, a tall, thin, stooped man of 40, led me from the administration,
> past the library, quoting the number of volumes with pride, and then past the
> humanities building. Looking up, I noticed a black-tinted window on the top
> floor. Strange lights pulsed out of the window.
>
> “That's, well. It's hard to define,” said my guide. He thought for a moment.
> “Have you ever heard of Geoff McKee?”
>
> “No.”
>
> “He's a cultural theorist.”
>
> “Ah.”
>
> “He did a good deal of work on the history of sweaters. But he was best known
> as a specialist in post-structuralist interpretation of academic
> discourse.”
>
> I nodded.
>
> “He had a book, it's a study analyzing cultural theory as a practice through
> a cultural theory framework. It's called Re/Curse, with a slash between the
> are-ee and the curse.”
>
> “That's the place for it,” I said. We were continuing on to the famous
> fountain made of heaped skulls, funded by the Defense Department, called
> “Defense Department Grant.” “So that's his office?”
>
> “His department. The Department of Sotsotsots.”
>
> “Sots sots?”
>
> “Yeah.”
>
> I risked it. “What does that mean?”
>
> “Well, Geoff could never have actually founded a discipline because he felt
> that would exercise undue influence over discourse, and to do that would
> invalidate the discipline from the beginning. But he felt the need to create
> a radical break with what he called an 'ugly latent linearity' in modern
> praxis. So, what he did, he decided to study the origin of the discipline he
> wasn't founding.”
>
> I waited. My host continued to speak in near paragraphs.
>
> “And the problem was, how do you study the origins of a discipline without
> creating it? You can't actually create a means for studying it, so you must
> study the way you might study it. But then you have to study the way you
> study the way you might study it. You can never actually define how you'll
> study it because to do so would point the way to an original framework.”
>
> “Why did he do this?”
>
> “Eventually Geoff thought he would hit a point where this process would
> accumulate into a set of findings which would point to a framework for an
> entire discipline which was based on absolutely no cultural assumptions.”
>
> “Find it sort of lying there on the ground.”
>
> “Yes.”
>
> “Or like those Russian guys who built a supercomputer to get to the four
> billionth digit of pi, looking for patterns.”
>
> “The Chudnovsky brothers. Other people made that comparison. So the program
> was registered under SOT. Since it was the Study of the Study of the Study of
> the Study of the and so on. They put a line over the SOT in the course
> schedule to show it was a repeating sequence. SOT SOT SOT SOT SOT forever.”
>
> “And McKee is?”
>
> “He's there, in the office. They had an opening with the president of the
> university. The next day McKee came in with a crate of books he planned not
> to read, a pen with no ink, and a pad of black construction paper for a
> notebook. He was trying to pioneer a theory of non-discourse. Something, we
> have no idea what it could have been because he couldn't have actually done
> anything according to his own process, um, anti-process, but something made
> things go wrong with time. The reason the room is dark is that light is slow
> inside. We had Physics over, they measured. But they were too
> solution-driven. That was 15 years ago.”
>
> “What did they suggest?”
>
> “They have this thing called a light accelerator, very new, and they said
> they could solve the problem, but one of our professors argued that in this
> context light was socially constructed, and if we manipulated it, we were
> encouraging photocentric culture and violating McKee's right to free inquiry.
> Cynthia Corley.”
>
> “Wait.” I did a little jump to jog my memory. “This is the woman who did the
> book on the interspecies relationships advocating we destroy the Earth rather
> than travel into space, as a gift to the universe.”
>
> “Astronaut Anti-Hermeneutics.”
>
> “Wasn't she arrested?”
>
> “At an anti-colonization protest.”
>
> I nodded, remembering the televised image of a broad-faced angry woman biting
> her tongue and spitting blood into the Senator's face, screaming “that's for
> the blood of the aliens you may some day shed if there are aliens.” She had a
> sign in green block letters that read “THE ALIEN IS NOT THE OTHER.” The clip
> had found its way into a Windowsill video called “Sasquatch,” and was now a
> classic “text” demonstrating the appropriation by popular culture of
> political and academic thought, with various conclusions drawn thereof.
>
> I asked, “So what happens in SOTSOTSOT now?”
>
> “We don't know. There's a protective barrier placed by the administration to
> keep students out...."
>
-- Dr Catherine Driscoll School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry University of Sydney Phone (61-2) 93569503
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